"I would hope and expect that the national government is giving consideration to a state funeral for Frank Fenner and I'm more than happy to contact the Prime Minister's office today to liaise with her office in relation to that," he said.

Mr Stanhope says it would also be appropriate to name a Canberra suburb after Professor Fenner.

"Frank Fenner regards himself as a Canberran, an international citizen, a great Australian but one of ours a great and distinguished Canberran," he said.

"I think it's very important that we do honour in perpetuity our great citizens such as Frank Fenner and I'm more than happy to facilitate that."

"It can be said of Professor Frank Fenner that he brought knowledge from the laboratory and magnificently applied it for the benefit of all mankind," he said.

"We mourn his death but we celebrate a truly great life."

Distinguished career

The Australian scientific community has praised Professor Fenner's "immeasurable" contributions.

After serving as an officer in the Australian Army Medical Corps during World War II, he came to work in Canberra in 1949.

He was appointed Professor of Microbiology at the new John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) at the Australian National University (ANU) and went on to head the school from 1967 to 1973.

Current JCSMR head Julio Licinio says Professor Fenner had a long and distinguished career at the ANU.

"He maintained and created a very lively work environment with many researchers coming from all over the world and from Australia to work here and give talks," he said.

"It was at that time in the '70s, Canberra was a very small community and keeping a very international and competitive enterprise here was not an easy task and he did that brilliantly.

He says much can be learnt from Professor Fenner's work.

"His major legacy is that you can do your research and be really accomplished at the bench which he was, but you can also bring that to the benefit worldwide and I think that's what we need to focus on in the future," he said.

"Frank did a great many things within the ANU, within the Canberra community, for Australia and indeed for the world," he said.

Professor Chubb says he will be well remembered.

"There's the Fenner School, and the Fenner Hall, there's the Fenner building which our resource and environmental studies are now built, there are Fenner bursaries but more than that he's got a lot of friends and a lot of respect from a great many people," he said.

Professor Fenner won numerous awards including the Albert Einstein World Award for Science in 2000 and the Prime Minister's Science Prize in 2002.

'Extraordinary legacy'

JCSMR head of immunology Professor Chris Parish says Professor Fenner was one of the world's greatest experts in virology.

"He was a national treasure, no question of it," he said.

Professor Fenner and fellow researchers famously injected themselves with the myxomatosis virus to show it would not harm humans while devastating rabbit populations.

"He was involved in looking at how the virus spread amongst the rabbit population. It was one of the first studies to show that when a pathogen's released into a population of susceptible individuals how the whole interaction co-evolves," Professor Parish said.

"Within two generations of rabbits, the rabbits had become resistant to myxomatosis and the virus had become less virulent.

"People had theorised about this in the past but he was the first to actually show in the field that coevolution between a pathogen and its host can occur so rapidly."

In the 1970s, Professor Fenner chaired a committee set up by the World Health Organisation to oversee the eradication of smallpox.

"He was involved in coordinating that whole plan to eradicate smallpox which he very successfully did," Professor Parish said.

"In 1980 he announced to the United Nations that smallpox had been eradicated from the planet."

"Firstly doing research in virology and the relationship between the host and pathogen which has stood the test of time," he said.

"Secondly this coevolution of a pathogen with its host, to show that that actually occurs very rapidly during a pandemic.

"Third, of course is overseeing the eradication of smallpox.

"But also he was one of the first people to really look at the interaction between the human population and both situations - the environment acting on the human population and vice versa - which was sort of a new area of ecology that he was very keen on."